Birthday: The Altair 8800 turns 34

This week in history: Friday was the 34th birthday of the Altair 8800 microcomputer.

Why does the Altair 8800 matter?

Well, the Altair 8800 was essentially the first personal computer (although it couldn’t do very much). And when Paul Allen spotted the Altair 8800 on the January 1975 cover of Popular Electronics, he and Gates decided to write the BASIC programming language for it.

Soon after, Microsoft was born. BASIC was Microsoft’s first product.

So, a little more on the Altair: A kit cost $395. Assembled it cost $495. But that only included 256 bytes of memory.